Suu146;s cautious dawn

After long months of house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi walked through her sky blue metal gate this week to cautious celebration. Is her cage r...

After long months of house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi walked through her sky blue metal gate this week to cautious celebration. Is her cage removed or simply enlarged? Will Myanmar8217;s military rulers embark on a real dialogue on substantive political change? Does Suu Kyi8217;s freedom signal liberation as well for several hundred of her party members still in jail? It may be a new dawn for the country, wrote THE NEW YORK TIMES, but dawn is only the start of the day.

Commentators agreed that Myanmar8217;s problems are chronic and beyond the scope of one leader 8212; even a Nobel prize-winning one 8212; to cure. The country lacks a democratic legislature, a functioning bureaucracy, education and health systems, an independent judiciary, a free press. But in a country that takes its symbols and omens very seriously, Suu Kyi8217;s release is at the very least a symbol of hope.

TIME seized the auspicious moment to focus on Myanmar8217;s rock stars 8212; yes, they do exist. It wrote about Zaw Win Htut, who drives a cherry red Chevy Impala and has enough money to be considering sending his daughter to an Australian boarding school.

He is the biggest rock star the country has ever produced. He writes his own songs, mainly ballads of lost love, and several have the word 8216;dream8217; in the title. He knows he can8217;t perform more provocative material. He must subject his songs and his lyrics, even the length of his hair, to the military8217;s scrutiny.

When India met Israel

This is not the West Bank8217;8217;, said TIME. 8216;8216;This is Ahmedabad, the city where Mohandas Gandhi set up his ashram8230;8217;8217; Two months after the violence drew international attention, the western media is still to arrive at a vocabulary that fits Gujarat. Can the land that once cradled the Gandhian dream be tidily slotted as 8216;India8217;s own Beirut8217;? Is it possible to fully explain Gujarat8217;s horror with reference to a distant conflict in the Middle East, one the West is more clued into? Isn8217;t the struggle to understand often forsaken for images of convenience?

TIME wasn8217;t inhibited by such questions. The magazine sounded chillingly certain that the young Muslims from Gujarat8217;s camps and ghettos 8216;8216;now look and think like their Palestinian counterparts8217;8217;. All the ingredients are there, it said: state oppression, poverty, disadvantage, wholesale discrimination, fertile recruiting grounds in the camps and ghettos, a ready weapon supply. 8216;8216;The calls for intifadeh and jihad have started8230; All that is lacking is a Hamas or al Qaeda.8217;8217;

Kitsch and tell

Bollywood mania is beginning to infect the UK this summer. Andrew Lloyd Webber8217;s stage extravaganza 8216;Bombay Dreams8217; opens next month but Bollywood films and Bollywood-inspired fashion are already on a roll. The British Film Institute8217;s Imagine Asia package opened with two 1950s films 8212; Pather Panchali and Mother India. To one pensive critic, the 8216;contemplative humanism8217; of Pather Panchali served up a reminder of another kind of Indian film-making that has perhaps fallen from favour, if not forgotten entirely. But for another, when the aged Radha in Mother India is finally prevailed upon to open the new dam, though she is wary of the modern technology, it was impossible not to think of Arundhati Roy.

Story continues below this ad

But seriously, the hype and the hoopla 8212; is it just the British over-indulging their taste for kitsch? Or has Bollywood finally earned itself a cross-over status?

With Lagaan reopening this week in New York at the distinguished Film Forum in South Village, THE NEW YORK TIMES advised its audience to leave their condescension at home. Because 8216;8216;Lagaan may look naive; it is anything but8217;8217;. This movie goes about pleasing a broad popular audience with 8216;8216;savvy professionalism and genuine flair8217;8217;. Aamir Khan8217;s 8216;8216;pouty smouldering good looks8217;8217;, the 8216;8216;erotic centre8217;8217; of the film, undoubtedly have something to do with the effusiveness. But it may be something more. The NYT announced that coming on the heels of Baz Luhrmann8217;s Bollywood-influenced Moulin Rouge, Lagaan seems to confirm the globalisation of the genre.

But Bollywood8217;s hallmark exuberance may be paling, recently warned Lee Server, author of 8216;Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo8217;, in American weekly THE VILLAGE VOICE. He saw a shift towards films that are self-consciously restrained and polished. 8216;8216;Now they look identical to a J.Lo video. A growing sophistication has come there, an Americanisation8217;8217;?

America8217;s date with a scam

Amid the muddy swirl of allegations in Coffingate, here8217;s proof that profiteering from disaster is not an uniquely Indian trait.

Story continues below this ad

NEWSWEEK sounded amazed at what lobbyists and politicians in the US are selling as crucial to the war on terror. California date farmers led a massive push to send their fruit to Afghanistan 8212; they argued that dates were essential to aid starving Afghans. Canny senators are reframing old requests in the new language of homeland defence. The farm subsidy programme 8212; the Agricultural Act of 2001 8212; was renamed the Farm Security Act. Alabama Republican Terry Everett insisted that a 3.5 billion subsidy for peanut farmers 8216;strengthens America8217;s national security8217;. The milk lobby won millions in subsidy for dairy farmers to protect the 8216;security8217; of the nation8217;s milk supply. Post 9-11, a 4.5 billion funding bill for Amtrak, the crisis-ridden national passenger railway, is called the National Defense Rail Act.

Really, why single out poor Bush for advancing his agenda of increased military spending in the name of 9-11?